Issues in the Transformation of Health and Medical Information

Tim Patrick, Paula Rhyner, Catherine Smith and Deborah Swain

Summary

How do you find health information for your own use? Has digitization and the growth of digital records impacted patients, healthcare practitioners, and information managers of medical records? This panel will present research and discuss with the audience three issues about how information technology has, is, or can impact society and individuals. Each panelist will share recent findings in their research on the transformation of personal and professional medical and health informatics.

According to many experts in the field of medicine, there is potential for a crisis in the collection and distribution of patient records and community health. In the 1990s the introduction of HIPAA (Health Information Privacy and Accountability Act) regulations protected individual privacy. How have electronic records transformed society and/or information? How is the technology changing information practices? This panel builds on earlier research on these questions reported at the 2007 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, and it is intended to provide an opportunity to share new findings about recent transformations. Each presenter will answer one of the following questions and will ask attendees to share their experiences, to respond also, and to ask more questions:

1. How can we use maps of the perceived value(s) of information flows to educate interdependent stakeholders in a healthcare domain?

2. How does our understanding of the consumer and our assumptions about what consumers think and feel affect our research into healthcare communication?

3. What is the boundary between personal views and the public health information space?